Claudia Rankine famous quotes

04-17-2025

Because white men canâ€™t police their imaginations, black men are dying.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Men #White #Imagination
The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Offering #Firsts #Facts
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Past #Tomorrow #Blunt
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
-- Claudia Rankine
You canâ€™t put the past behind you. Itâ€™s buried in you; itâ€™s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Past #World #Flesh
The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Feelings #Injury #Worst
Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?
-- Claudia Rankine

#Body
I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Body #Forgotten
Iâ€™m not investigating race as much as Iâ€™m investigating intimacy.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Race #Intimacy
Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousnessâ€”all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Memories #Stupid #Optimistic
Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.
-- Claudia Rankine

#Loneliness
The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?
-- Claudia Rankine

#Thinking #Past #Flesh

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